Tangents Of Terror

Infinite worlds? Let's just start with a dozen, shall we?

The world is coming apart.

There have always been places where the barriers between realities were thin; some of those places – The Bermuda Triangle, Loch Ness, Easter Island, Roswell – are famous. Most are known only to a select few conspiratorial groups who zealously and jealously guard their places of power. It has always been possible to gain glimpses of parallel Earths from these places, and such “bleed-overs” are often mistaken for ghosts, hauntings, and other supernatural events. Every now and then, a physical transfer would take place, creating strange appearances or disappearances. Some of these places where realities bleed into each other are permanent, but most are temporary. That’s the way it’s always been.

But lately, something has changed. The secret societies and government agencies that monitor these phenomena have begun to notice an increase of “accidental” physical transfers between worlds, and a general upward trend in associated “psychic” phenomenon. It has become easier to travel between realities; the barriers between worlds are getting thinner, and menaces once held back by the vast energies of superspace now have freer reign across many dimensions. Some mystics and prophets, possibly deranged, deliver disturbing visions of whole universes vanishing, devoured by envious intelligences that never existed.

This is a campaign using the ALTERNITY rules, that blends conspiracy horror/sci-fi with alternative history and interdimensional travel; think The X-Files meets Stargate.

The time frame is now, in the early 21st Century… at least on our Earth. There are other Earths out there, in the past relative to us, and where history happened differently than most of us remember. For centuries, a few (un)lucky or gifted individuals – psychics, mediums, artists – have been able to glimpse these alternate realities; on rare occasions, someone from our world would disappear into another, or vice versa. Travel between these worlds has always been theoretically possible, but incredibly difficult without the use of advanced (alien?) technology (though some claim that there are psychic individuals who can travel using nothing but the power of their minds).

In the default campaign frame, PCs are agents of Task Force 13, a super-secret agency loosely affiliated with the U.N. TF-13 was founded in the late 1940s to monitor and investigate occult threats to global security, and it is in this capacity that they discovered the existence of parallel Earths, from which many such threats originate. After recruitment and promotion to agent status, PC teams are dispatched on extended missions into alternate Earths for the purposes of exploration, research, rescue, investigation of threat origins, discovery of potential resources for Baseline Earth’s benefit, and so on. Because most of the 11 easily-accessible “histalts” (short for “historical alternates,” the parallel Earths) are in the past relative to Baseline, missions can take on several tones, from grim medieval horror, to post-apocalyptic survival, to swashbuckling adventure during the Age of Sail. Back home, missions can take the agents to far corners of the world, searching for links between the histalts and common occult events like UFO sightings/abductions, hauntings, crop circles, monster encounters or unexplained mass disappearances.

Be sure to look over the material on this wiki carefully, and make sure to create characters with backgrounds and abilities that will actually end up being useful and relevant.